The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Joys of Interdisciplinary Work

by Erik Gern in CodeSOD on 2014-07-30

Lisa thought that the Modesto Biology Institute was the perfect working environment. The scientists who showed her around were all friendly, not the "evil, lab-coated villains" portrayed in Fritz Lang films. The lab director, Howard, pointed out the lack of horror monsters in their lab after Lisa joked about it during her interview.

"See?" Howard said, gesturing. "You won't find anything scarier than a petri dish in here ... except for grant applications." He looked disgusted at the suggestion.

63 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-07

An Odd Way to Find Even Numbers

by Erik Gern in CodeSOD on 2014-07-22

Fred S. never much cared for zebra striping, the UI pattern that was all the rage after Mac OS X launched in 2001. It found its way into other Mac applications, web pages, even onto Linux. Like a tsunami of alternating grey-and-white waves, it overtook everything in its path.

After numerous requests from users, the project manager for WeightTracker asked Fred to add zebra striping to the weight journal window. Fred had inherited oversight of the application after the original developer, Louis, had been poached by their underperforming rival.

95 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-04

State of the UNION

by Erik Gern in CodeSOD on 2014-07-14

Correct now, optimize later. is one of the most important developer mantras and Scott K. followed it to a fault. He was on a team of programmers debugging a C# package management application, which used Microsoft SQL for revision tracking. Make sure it works right the first time; you can always tease out more performance after launch.

But if your program takes ten minutes to extract a C# package, as Scott discovered, you might want to optimize sooner rather than later.

51 comments - Last comment @ 2014-07-31